ACCORDING TO NAPOLEON, HIS mother chose to send him to St. Colmcille’s for the sense of community.
I squinted. “Community,” I repeated, in a way that was not a question, exactly, but did communicate confusion.
“Catholic community,” he pointed out.
“Catholic,” I said. “So you’re Catholic? Huh. Go figure.”
Napoleon shook his head at me. Already not an unusual reaction. “Yes,” he said, “go figure.”
I should have been getting used to imports of new types to the school by now. Up until my sixth grade year it was nearly unheard of for anybody to come to this school by any other method besides on foot. Neighborhood school, and all. It was a nice school, comfortable old building, big playground, couple of trees splashed around, Garcia’s Superette, which sold everything smaller than a car, right on the corner. But it was probably not unlike loads of other parochial schools all over the place. Same uniforms, same Pledge of Allegiance, same boring subjects, same Jesus. So there was never any reason for folks to go to any great trouble to send their kids across the city any distance to get here.
Until the busing thing. Kids crisscrossing the city to go to public schools. In other neighborhoods.
Other people’s public schools.
And that’s when the “community” thing got big. It was all over the papers. People were defending their “community schools” as something sacred. So lots of people bailed out and started sending their kids to Catholic schools. For the community. No matter how far away the community happened to be. I had to wonder if I just didn’t know what the C word meant, or if somebody was changing it.
“What time is it, boys?”
“Oh no, please, not this.”
“Come on, Manny, what time is it?”
Manny sighed. Glen stared at me very serious, like a teacher. “Can’t you talk about anything else?” Glen asked. Glen was about the sharpest guy we had. Knew all kinds of things. Most of which I figure a person doesn’t really need to know. “There are lots of other things worth thinking about.”
I gave him back the look. “No there ain’t.”
Manny lifted the top of his flip-top desk and made like he was disappearing into it. Glen just shook his head and returned to reading.
Napoleon Charlie Ellis entered the room and sat in an empty seat behind me. “Hello,” he said to me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ll ask you, then. What time is it?”
Napoleon looked deeply puzzled. He peered up at the very big and obvious white moon-face clock hanging at the front of the room.
“Aw,” I said, “if you have to look at the clock, you’re lost.”
“I do not understand...” Napoleon started.
But Manny couldn’t take it anymore. “It’s freakin’ Freddie time!” he blurted from inside his messy desk.
“Yesssss!” I said.
Freddie time.
Gold Dust time.
We had been waiting for this for a long time. Since 1918, to be exact. The arrival of Fred Lynn and Jim Rice to the Red Sox major league club. Everyone who knew the game knew that Lynn was going to be the best, ever. And that Rice was probably going to be the second best. The papers had already been calling them the Gold Dust Twins, the best pair of rookies ever to come along to one team in the same year. I had been charting their progress through the minor leagues since the Sox signed them, and finally, this was their year. And today. Today was the glorious first day, the ritual, where the huge eighteen-wheeler equipment trucks were packed up and dispatched to Winter Haven, Florida. Spring training. Every newscast in town showed footage of the trucks heading off. It was breathtaking.
Fred Lynn. My man. Breathtaking.
Jim Rice. Breathtaking.
Finally. Hallelujah.
“Excuse me?” Napoleon asked.
I ran through the whole scenario again. Happily. I half-hoped he would ask me to do it again.
“Oh,” he said instead. “Baseball. I’m sorry, I don’t follow baseball. I play cricket.”
My turn. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged.
I had never even heard of this condition before.
“Everybody likes baseball,” I pointed out.
“No, actually,” he said politely but firmly. “Everybody does not.”
Both Manny and Glen started laughing at this. Not loud mocking laughter, but the low, teasing, challenging kind. “So,” Manny said in his exaggerated accent, “Meester Beisbol, whatchu gonna do about thees?”
I looked at Napoleon behind me, then over to Manny, then back to Napoleon. “I’m going to help him,” I said calmly. “He needs help.”
“I need no help, thank you.”
“You’ll be happier. ...”
He scowled at me. “I am quite happy.”
“Look,” I said. Napoleon was turning out to be a kind of challenge, like a sneaky tough pitcher who kept making me hit fouls, and I had to figure him out. “These guys here were new once. They listened to me, and look at them now.”
Glen gave a little embarrassed wave, and Manny a big, smiley one. It would be hard to notice now, but they really were raw material when the two of them moved in over on Fortuna Avenue five years ago. They didn’t need a whole lot of work since they came from Cuba, where Louis Tiant came from, so baseball was already wired into them. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t come a long way, although I might have stretched it to say they did it by listening to me. Stretched it only a little, though.
As long as you have baseball on your side, you can overcome anything.
I just sort of hung there, turned around in my seat, smiling very friendly at Napoleon, like I was some kind of ambassador or something. He did not smile back. He did not do anything that I could tell. He was flunking.
“So then, the goal is to be like you? That is the key to happiness?”
I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before. Not in those very words. But hearing them now... I didn’t know. A guy could do a lot worse.
I apparently had dwelled on this for a while without answering. “Turn around please,” Napoleon said coolly.
“Call me when you need me,” I said.
My concentration had been broken for too long now anyway. This was not like me, in late winter, sitting at my desk in school, before the start of lessons. I had to focus.
Fred Lynn. ...
Fred Lynn. ...
Fred Lynn. ...